Saturday, February 25, 2017

December 2, 2015



December 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer


Dear Students,

This is my second response to “Epistemological Barriers to Radical Behaviorism” (1998) by O’Donohoe, Gallaghan and Ruchstuhl. I will only pick a few lines from this paper to help to help you understand that my distinction between Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) is an extension of B.F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism.

Skinner (1975) stated “(as James suggested),"Perhaps we do not strike because we feel anger but feel angry because we strike" (p.43). It is interesting to note that James uses the expression of a negative emotion to make something clear about the expression of emotion. Since this would be an example of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), I want to give you an example of the expression of positive emotions, of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). When you find out by listening to yourself while you speak that you sound good, you are not trying to sound good. As long as you are trying to sound good, you are not sounding good. 

Once you sound good, this is not caused by you, but rather, you sound good as you can sound good. In other words, you only sound good as you are simultaneously really feeling good. If you share this experience of listening to yourself while you speak with others who, like you, also listen to themselves while they speak, you will all agree that when we engage in SVB, each speaker sounds and simultaneously feels good. This makes total sense as SVB signifies the absence of aversive stimulation. 

Going back to the aforementioned example by William James and applying it SVB (the expression of positive emotion), we don’t sound good because we feel good, that is, our pleasant-sounding voice is not caused by this inner feeling. Instead, we can feel good, because we can sound good. In other words, we feel good because we can express our positive emotions. 

Each time the circumstances allowed this to happen, our experience of positive emotions co-occurred with our accurate verbal expression of these positive emotions. Since only SVB can stimulate and evoke the speaker-as-own-listener, which is needed to accurately describe our positive emotions, our positive emotions are only validated, enhanced and increased to the extent that we are achieving instances of SVB. NVB, on the other hand, is about the reinforcement of our negative emotions. In NVB, we say ‘I have to disagree with you’ as we feel compelled, coerced and bound.

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